[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [day] [month] [year] [list]
Message-ID: <20090116061657.GC6515@barrios-desktop>
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2009 15:16:57 +0900
From: MinChan Kim <minchan.kim@...il.com>
To: Nick Piggin <npiggin@...e.de>
Cc: Matthew Wilcox <matthew@....cx>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
linux-mm@...ck.org, linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org,
akpm@...ux-foundation.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Remove needless flush_dcache_page call
On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 07:13:41AM +0100, Nick Piggin wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 03:08:30PM +0900, MinChan Kim wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 10:57:30PM -0700, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > > Most I/O devices will do DMA to the page in question and thus the kernel
> > > hasn't written to it and the CPU won't have the data in cache. For the
> > > few devices which can't do DMA, it's the responsibility of the device
> > > driver to call flush_dcache_page() (or some other flushing primitive).
> >
> > Hmm.. Now I am confusing.
> > If devicer driver or with DMA makes sure cache consistency,
> > Why filesystem code have to handle it ?
>
> Because the filesystem is accessing the page directly rathe rthan going to
> IO.
>
> Basically, whoever reads or writes the page is responsible to avoid user
> aliases. You see these calls in the VM for anonymous pages, in bounce
> buffer layers, in filesystems that read or write from pages that are
> exposed to userspace (ie. metadata generally need not be flushed because
> it will not be mmapped by userspace).
Totally, understand.
Thanks for kind answering to my poor question in patience.
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@...r.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
Powered by blists - more mailing lists